Posted on 10/28/2011 6:59:29 AM PDT by markomalley
October 31 is only three days away. For Protestants, it is Reformation Day, the date in 1517 on which Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to that famous door in Wittenberg, Germany. Since I returned to the Catholic Church in April 2007, each year the commemoration has become a time of reflection about my own journey and the puzzles that led me back to the Church of my youth.
One of those puzzles was the relationship between the Church, Tradition, and the canon of Scripture. As a Protestant, I claimed to reject the normative role that Tradition plays in the development of Christian doctrine. But at times I seemed to rely on it. For example, on the content of the biblical canon – whether the Old Testament includes the deuterocanonical books (or “Apocrypha”), as the Catholic Church holds and Protestantism rejects. I would appeal to the exclusion of these books as canonical by the Jewish Council of Jamnia (A.D. 90-100) as well as doubts about those books raised by St. Jerome, translator of the Latin Vulgate, and a few other Church Fathers.
My reasoning, however, was extra-biblical. For it appealed to an authoritative leadership that has the power to recognize and certify books as canonical that were subsequently recognized as such by certain Fathers embedded in a tradition that, as a Protestant, I thought more authoritative than the tradition that certified what has come to be known as the Catholic canon. This latter tradition, rejected by Protestants, includes St. Augustine as well as the Council of Hippo (A.D. 393), the Third Council of Carthage (A.D. 397), the Fourth Council of Carthage (A.D. 419), and the Council of Florence (A.D. 1441).
But if, according to my Protestant self, a Jewish council and a few Church Fathers are the grounds on which I am justified in saying what is the proper scope of the Old Testament canon, then what of New Testament canonicity? So, ironically, given my Protestant understanding of ecclesiology, then the sort of authority and tradition that apparently provided me warrant to exclude the deuterocanonical books from Scripture – binding magisterial authority with historical continuity – is missing from the Church during the development of New Testament canonicity.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, maintains that this magisterial authority was in fact present in the early Church and thus gave its leadership the power to recognize and fix the New Testament canon. So, ironically, the Protestant case for a deuterocanonical-absent Old Testament canon depends on Catholic intuitions about a tradition of magisterial authority.
This led to two other tensions. First, in defense of the Protestant Old Testament canon, I argued, as noted above, that although some of the Church’s leading theologians and several regional councils accepted what is known today as the Catholic canon, others disagreed and embraced what is known today as the Protestant canon. It soon became clear to me that this did not help my case, since by employing this argumentative strategy, I conceded the central point of Catholicism: the Church is logically prior to the Scriptures. That is, if the Church, until the Council of Florence’s ecumenical declaration in 1441, can live with a certain degree of ambiguity about the content of the Old Testament canon, that means that sola scriptura was never a fundamental principle of authentic Christianity.
After all, if Scripture alone applies to the Bible as a whole, then we cannot know to which particular collection of books this principle applies until the Bible’s content is settled. Thus, to concede an officially unsettled canon for Christianity’s first fifteen centuries seems to make the Catholic argument that sola scriptura was a sixteenth-century invention and, therefore, not an essential Christian doctrine.
Second, because the list of canonical books is itself not found in Scripture – as one can find the Ten Commandments or the names of Christ’s apostles – any such list, whether Protestant or Catholic, would be an item of extra-biblical theological knowledge. Take, for example, a portion of the revised and expanded Evangelical Theological Society statement of faith suggested (and eventually rejected by the membership) by two ETS members following my return to the Catholic Church. It states that, “this written word of God consists of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments and is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behavior.”
But the belief that the Bible consists only of sixty-six books is not a claim of Scripture, since one cannot find the list in it, but a claim about Scripture as a whole. That is, the whole has a property – i.e., “consisting of sixty-six books,” – that is not found in any of the parts. In other words, if the sixty-six books are the supreme authority on matters of belief, and the number of books is a belief, and one cannot find that belief in any of the books, then the belief that Scripture consists of sixty-six particular books is an extra-biblical belief, an item of theological knowledge that is prima facie non-biblical.
For the Catholic, this is not a problem, since the Bible is the book of the Church, and thus there is an organic unity between the fixing of the canon and the development of doctrine and Christian practice.
Although I am forever indebted to my Evangelical brethren for instilling and nurturing in me a deep love of Scripture, it was that love that eventually led me to the Church that had the authority to distinguish Scripture from other things.
I thought you weren't responding to me anymore. I guess you couldn't pass up an opportunity to gang dump, could you? Hopefully, you have read the subsequent posts and see that there really was no discrepancy only one of your gang's inability to look at the OTHER chapter that was also given as the source. That's chapter XIX, or 19 for the unlearned. There is even an online link to read it for yourself, since none of my comments measure up to the "impeccable" research so many of your friends demonstrate. The link is http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18438/18438-h/18438-h.htm#19
I don’t believe you.
Please stop with this charade. Continuing to suggest that you were posting from the original material and from within the context and intent as the authors intended is as dishonest as presenting them dishonestly in the first place. You ran with unverified information because you seemingly wanted it to be true.
Please see post #3580 for details.
The link I gave said it was in the Appendix. According to http://www.orthodoxanswers.org/orthodoxbibles?noredir=1:
In terms of "canon," the Orthodox Old Testament includes the 39 universally received ("canonical") books as well as the books found in the Septuagint which have always been read, used or explicitely quoted by the early Christians (Letter to the Hebrews, St. Polycarp of Smyrna. These books are part of the Orthodox Bible and lectionary but not with full canonical status; they are often called "deuterocanonical" or "to be read" (Anagignoskomena (αναγιγνωσκόμενα)). As a result, it can be said that the canon of the Old Testament is somewhat "open" with degrees of witnessing authority.
The EOB: Eastern - Greek Orthodox Bible offers an original scholarly translation of the New Testament which is based on the official text of the Greek speaking Orthodox Churches (the Patriarchal Text of 1904). The EOB companion to the OSB scheduled for early 2009 will include a comprehensive introduction to the Old Testament together with 4 Maccabees and the EOB New Testament and Appendices. The full release of the EOB (OT based on LXX with all MT variants and NT) is scheduled for 2011.
I agree, it IS amazing and strange. But I think we can all figure out why, can’t we?
Hopefully, you have by now read the response that the link did INDEED say that the verbiage was from chapter XIX from the same book. It was NOT falsified at all, you only failed to look there and when you looked at XXIII and couldn't find it you immediately assumed the worst and started in on a rave about liars, sloppy work and evil motives and your fellows joined in with you in your false injury. I guess an apology would be too much to expect.
Do you have a source for that ditty, or did it come out of your own thought patterns? As for the anti-Protestant content, I would say whoever wrote it has a false understanding of how we think. Had the RCC stayed faithful to the authority of the Divinely-inspired Scriptures - as was voiced by most of the ECF - , there may not have even been a need for the Reformation. But God STILL works in the hearts of man.
And God said, "Come and let us reason together". I guess, though, if you have left reason at the door of the "Church", you will have nothing to bring to God and will be at the mercy of those who MUST convince you they'll do the reasoning for you.
The father was a fisherman and educated his sons in fishing. Have you been to Temple? How much reading is done? How much listening? How much praying? The Jewish oral tradition is amongst the best in history. Except for the priestly class, only the upper class could claim any considerable level of literacy.
I would ask anyone more knowledgeable than I about this era to chip in, if you would.
Where that 97% figure comes from I've no idea but consider some ancient libraries like the one found at Ugarit in Syria. It dates from around the 1300-1400 b.c. or the vast library of Ashurbanipal of the 7th. cen. b.c. This collection of tablets numbered 20 to 30 thousand and covered everything from the most sacred to the most mundane of commercial notes and recipes. Clearly many people were scratching bills and notes of all kinds on shards and clay tablets routinely.
97% of primitive societies' population were existence agrarians or artisans. They had no time or money to be educated.
The motivation to read God's word for ones self is and was a powerful motivation to learn to read.
The leap to literacy was spurred on by Gutenberg's press, sure.
Absolutely not, but I will accept yours.
Only one chapter was named and I posted the entire contents of that chapter to show that it was not in it.
Further, the actual chapter the quotation which came from a chapter entitled "Whence our Belief; Reason, is so distorted in the context and portrayal in post as to be intentionally misleading.
A desperate desire for something to be true does not relieve one from the duty to fact check before representing it as the truth. You carrying on like you had some actual scholarship and had read any of the cited works beyond their truncated postings in anti-Catholic websites or within threads in Free Republic threads is pathetic. Show some self respect and respect for the Religion Forum and either admit your error or shut up about it. I'm tired of watching people try to make chicken soup out of chicken waste.
Trent was merely an affirmation of an existing condition, much like most Councils dealt with most of the time. When Jerome's opinion was overruled, that was that as far as the Latins were concerned.
I believe that Jesus Christ is the Lord God Almighty, through Whom all was made. I do not believe that the words of men equal the words of God. I believe that no man equals the Word of God.
As I said before, pale imitations of the Church and even paler imitators of God might get the occasional thing right, but they still get most of it wrong. Witness the disaster of the Reformation, with increasing splintering, increasing nonChristian beliefs and and decreasing believers.
Only if you can get your hands on the originals. Would you not admit that the Comma Johanneum, added later, changed things considerably? How about the baptismal formula in Matthew 28? The earliest copies do not contain the Trinitarian formula. Does that mean error?
Netheir is Ezra or Nehemiah or several others, for that matter. They are not mentioned at all in the entire NT. Have you redacted them from your Bible yet?
Not all of them. I ask again. What will you do with those books?
Then what does this mean?:
"Sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture make up a single sacred deposit of the Word of God, which is entrusted to the Church." -Second Vatican Council. "Dogmatic Consitution on Divine Revelation," no. 10. Or this?
"...the Church does not draw her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone. Hence, both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honored with EQUAL feelings of devotion and reverence." Second Vatican Council, "Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation", no. 9. Or this?:
"[The Church] has always regarded, and continues to regard the Scriptures, taken together with sacred Tradition, as the supreme ruler of her faith." -Second Vatican Council, "Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation", no. 21.
As the saying goes, POUND SAND.
Check your own motives before you presume to tell others theirs.
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